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Description
All good things must come to an end, or so they say. Not even the sun shall last forever. Youth gives way to life, then to old age, and, at last, to a long rest. I used to believe that. But now, I’m not so sure. All that I know is what I must now do—for her sake, as well as mine.

Whoever you are, if you are reading this, then it means that I have left, for good. No, not dead; merely elsewhere. And though there will come a day when I, too, am dead, I will still live on. All of us shall, and in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine.

Death is not what I once thought it to be.

Dear reader: you may consider this notebook my last will and testament, and my message to the world. My only request is that you might spend the time to listen to the tale I have to tell; may it help you to find your Light.

It began with an end—the worst ending imaginable. Oh, my sweet Eva; darling girl…

My career was a simple one: an engineer on the transcontinental line. It was hard work, and it could have paid better, but I loved every minute of it, all the same. During workdays, I went where the levecar went, riding along in the maintenance car, right next to the caboose. It was my flat away from home—or, rather, our flat away from home. I had made certain that Eva would never have to fear her father being gone. Ever since her mother passed, it was the best that I could do. You can’t raise a child if you can never be there for them.

And, somehow, it worked. We lived there, on the train, as happy as could be. With all the time we spent there, we were able to make the car a place of our own. Gutting out half of the seats, we made space for all the essentials: a workstation for repairs and fine tuning, a space for a table, a counter, a sink, and a stove, even a cupboard, and a little bookshelf. My supervisor was kind enough to let us stay with our car, no matter where or to what she might find herself attached. And in between shifts—or whenever my labors were not needed—that little car was our world to explore.

It fell to me to take charge of my daughter’s education. I purchased her books and supplies—the best I could find—and taught her everything I knew. She was such a voracious reader. It made me so proud. And, if I do say so myself, it helped keep her out of trouble and many a dangerous spot. There’s something about children and mechanical marvels: they can never be kept apart from one another for very long. And when your marvel zooms across the land like a time-lapse of fog, vigilance must be constant. I tried many things to keep her from wandering. But, whenever she ran out of books, it seems, her curiosity would not allow her to stay put. There was one thing that worked—somewhat.

I told her to pretend that the train wasn’t really a train at all, but a strange, enchanted land. Some places were safe to travel, but others were dangerous and full of mystery. One day, a passenger car might be a tempestuous ocean, far too stormy for any ship to safely cross. Another day, the generator rooms might be the underground city of the energy goblins; they would shock you and snatch you away if they ever found you wandering in their domains without a guide to protect you.

It was the first of several very good ideas of mine—and she enjoyed every minute of it.

She got better as she got older. I no longer needed to fear her walking up to the passengers and striking up a talk; I no longer worried about her pulling the wrong levers, or going out through the wrong door. As she grew, she became the greatest assistant an engineer could ever ask for. There were times I thought she knew the field matrices even better than I. Though she didn’t have my gift—magic did not come to her without hard work—she had something even better: a gift for understanding. My experience of magic was a very visual one: fields made their presence known to me as many-colored manifolds. It sometimes takes time for me to pick out the exact frequencies of the harmonic—to distinguish this blue from that blue, or soft red-orange from almost orange.

But Eva? She was like a passage taken right out of Praixal: to her, it was all as simple as song. She’d close her eyes for just a moment, to listen close to the harmonics, and she could give a straight analysis before you could even ask her what she was doing. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell whether it was talent, or just a reflection of how hard she worked—how much she cared about every little thing she ever did.

In that, she had always been so much like her mother.

Whenever we weren’t working, she would either be reading, or jotting things down inside notebooks. Gods, her and her notebooks! She became very secretive about them, especially in her adolescence. They say that there’s a certain age between a girl and a woman where you can never get a straight answer of them. But my Eva was a head above the rest.

No, she didn’t share it with me—but at least she had the manners to be polite about it.

“It’s a secret, Papa,” she would say, as she lay back on the couch, scribbling away, with a twinkle in her eye. “And it’s not even half-way finished!”

I admit it, there were times I tried to peak. And she snapped at me. And I utterly deserved it.

There were many times I wished Emma could have seen the incredible person our treasure had become. Eva was beautiful in the best of all ways. There was a fire in her; no, not a fire… something shimmering, like silver. Her will was strong, and her curiosity even stronger—simply insatiable. She was diligent and focused, yet open and warm-hearted. She could adapt without complaint, save for when it shod against the grain of her principles. She always kept to her principles; that was her most important principle of all.

She was everything a parent could have ever hoped for. All that I wished and prayed for her to be and become, she became.

Until that day…

We were doing final maintenance for brand-new stoneway track out in the Voccife swamps. Prani had just finished building an expansion to its wharf; they petitioned for approval to build a small stoneway from their port district out to the main line. “Seterran produce isn’t going to ship itself,” they said. They got their approval; a twennit later, Eva and I, and a whole team of civil engineers were out in the estuaries, the water thigh-high. Any part of us that wasn’t drenched by the waters got soaked by our sweat; it was one sweltering day after another, and one horrendous week. You never truly know your body until you’ve been injured in places you hadn’t thought possible.

We got stung so very many times. Looking back on it now, as a whole, we had far better luck than we probably deserved. Eva was one of the few unlucky ones. As soon as she turned feverish, I feared for the worst. I offered up my sick days and took her home.

We lived in Bristing, about a mode and quarter’s ride by the underway from Skytown. It was a little place: the upper flat of a narrow duplex, squeezed tight between a row of old townhouses on narrow street that had only just been paved. Our flat was a little crooked near the top; Eva had always said it was like a tired tike, the way it leaned against the shoulders of the stalwart townhouses right next door.

I set her up nice and comfortable in her bed; bought a little generator to set up a warming enchantment on the covers. She felt so cold, she kept on telling me; a couple hours later, she screamed and cried, convinced that someone was trying to roast her alive. And so, I would turn it down. Not too long after, she’d start trembling and shivering, her teeth chattering like knocking bones. To the touch, she felt like fire.

She would never get up from that bed. It took the doctor only a couple of hours to arrive after I’d first placed the call. Even so, it already felt like I’d been through the Abyss and back.

“Blue fever,” he said. Nothing he could do. “She’s a strong one, though… so I can’t say how long.”

In the end, it took five long days and nights, not counting the one spent on the levecar on the ride back home.

It’s not the kind of experience that can be described with any justice. Even now, it still takes me a great effort to commit the words to the pages. What terrified me above all else was a stray thought that came to me, in the middle of the night of the third day.

There was a part of me that wanted her to die. To have to watch her suffer through that nightmare of ice and fire, in agony each and every moment… it broke me. I wished she would die, only so that she would not have to suffer. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of this.

I wonder… does that make me a sinner? Or a defective parent? That’s a question whose answer I’ll probably never know.

She was so weak when the end finally came. Yet, beaten and defeated though she was, that shimmering silver sliver in her soul stayed until the very end.

I’ll never forget that moment for as long as I live.

I was in the middle of what should have been a simple matter: brewing her a cup of herbal tea. The stove, of all things, had decided to break down. I needed to re-tune the fields for its operating enchantments. I was trying to jostle the panel off the front of the thing when I heard her call me. Her voice was so soft—so quiet—barely above a whisper. But I heard it, all the same.

I came rushing in. Her covers were drenched again.

“Eva,” I said. “The sheets; the blanket. They need to be—”

“—No, Papa.” Her voice trembled; her breathing was shaky. “I want to tell you….”

I knelt down at her bedside. “What? What is it, sweetheart?”

“My secret,” she said.

I saw her try to smile. I nearly lost it then, but I had to stay strong.

“I’ve been making something.” She spoke her words slowly, struggling through them, one by one. “For a long time, now.”

“Yes?” I whispered.

She turned her head toward me. Sweat matted her hair to the nape of her neck.

“A world.”

“What?” I still didn’t understand.

“Remember that one game we used to play… when I was little?” She shuddered, squinting her eyes shut for a moment. “You… you told me that the train… that it was an enchanted land. Remember?”

How could I ever forget? It had been one of my biggest successes.

“Those little stories you made up… they were like gems, Papa. I treasured them. And—and so I,” she gasped.

“Yes?”

“I made some of my own.”

Lights went off inside my mind.

“Your notebooks! Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?”

Weakly, she nodded. “I wanted to show them to you, but, I was always worried that they weren’t good enough. That they weren’t… finished.”

“Well,” I said. I tried my best to sound brave—for her sake. “Now is as good a time as any.”

I’d placed her box of possessions on the kitchen table when I’d brought her back into the house, five days before. Not a soul had touched them since then.

As I rose up, she reached out and grabbed my arm. The palms of her hands were like wet rags: clammy, loose, and weak.

“But it’s not finished yet….”

“Never you worry about that, Eva. We can finish them, together.”

I was already in tears.

I went into the kitchen. It took me only a moment. I pulled out the smaller box inside the larger one where she kept her notebooks.

I walked back over to her room.

“Here, Eva,” I said. “I have them.” I set the box of notebooks down the on the chair by her desk.

But she didn’t say anything. I turned my head to look.

It was like a painting, done in shadows and dark tones. Beads of sweat clung to her face, and to her arms where the sleeves had been rolled up. Her skin seemed almost grey toned; near her face, tinted a pale, ashen blue. She didn’t move.

She was gone.

Description
All good things must come to an end, or so they say. Not even the sun shall last forever. Youth gives way to life, then to old age, and, at last, to a long rest. I used to believe that. But now, I’m not so sure. All that I know is what I must now do—for her sake, as well as mine.

Whoever you are, if you are reading this, then it means that I have left, for good. No, not dead; merely elsewhere. And though there will come a day when I, too, am dead, I will still live on. All of us shall, and in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine.

Death is not what I once thought it to be.

Dear reader: you may consider this notebook my last will and testament, and my message to the world. My only request is that you might spend the time to listen to the tale I have to tell; may it help you to find your Light.

It began with an end—the worst ending imaginable. Oh, my sweet Eva; darling girl…

My career was a simple one: an engineer on the transcontinental line. It was hard work, and it could have paid better, but I loved every minute of it, all the same. During workdays, I went where the levecar went, riding along in the maintenance car, right next to the caboose. It was my flat away from home—or, rather, our flat away from home. I had made certain that Eva would never have to fear her father being gone. Ever since her mother passed, it was the best that I could do. You can’t raise a child if you can never be there for them.

And, somehow, it worked. We lived there, on the train, as happy as could be. With all the time we spent there, we were able to make the car a place of our own. Gutting out half of the seats, we made space for all the essentials: a workstation for repairs and fine tuning, a space for a table, a counter, a sink, and a stove, even a cupboard, and a little bookshelf. My supervisor was kind enough to let us stay with our car, no matter where or to what she might find herself attached. And in between shifts—or whenever my labors were not needed—that little car was our world to explore.

It fell to me to take charge of my daughter’s education. I purchased her books and supplies—the best I could find—and taught her everything I knew. She was such a voracious reader. It made me so proud. And, if I do say so myself, it helped keep her out of trouble and many a dangerous spot. There’s something about children and mechanical marvels: they can never be kept apart from one another for very long. And when your marvel zooms across the land like a time-lapse of fog, vigilance must be constant. I tried many things to keep her from wandering. But, whenever she ran out of books, it seems, her curiosity would not allow her to stay put. There was one thing that worked—somewhat.

I told her to pretend that the train wasn’t really a train at all, but a strange, enchanted land. Some places were safe to travel, but others were dangerous and full of mystery. One day, a passenger car might be a tempestuous ocean, far too stormy for any ship to safely cross. Another day, the generator rooms might be the underground city of the energy goblins; they would shock you and snatch you away if they ever found you wandering in their domains without a guide to protect you.

It was the first of several very good ideas of mine—and she enjoyed every minute of it.

She got better as she got older. I no longer needed to fear her walking up to the passengers and striking up a talk; I no longer worried about her pulling the wrong levers, or going out through the wrong door. As she grew, she became the greatest assistant an engineer could ever ask for. There were times I thought she knew the field matrices even better than I. Though she didn’t have my gift—magic did not come to her without hard work—she had something even better: a gift for understanding. My experience of magic was a very visual one: fields made their presence known to me as many-colored manifolds. It sometimes takes time for me to pick out the exact frequencies of the harmonic—to distinguish this blue from that blue, or soft red-orange from almost orange.

But Eva? She was like a passage taken right out of Praixal: to her, it was all as simple as song. She’d close her eyes for just a moment, to listen close to the harmonics, and she could give a straight analysis before you could even ask her what she was doing. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell whether it was talent, or just a reflection of how hard she worked—how much she cared about every little thing she ever did.

In that, she had always been so much like her mother.

Whenever we weren’t working, she would either be reading, or jotting things down inside notebooks. Gods, her and her notebooks! She became very secretive about them, especially in her adolescence. They say that there’s a certain age between a girl and a woman where you can never get a straight answer of them. But my Eva was a head above the rest.

No, she didn’t share it with me—but at least she had the manners to be polite about it.

“It’s a secret, Papa,” she would say, as she lay back on the couch, scribbling away, with a twinkle in her eye. “And it’s not even half-way finished!”

I admit it, there were times I tried to peak. And she snapped at me. And I utterly deserved it.

There were many times I wished Emma could have seen the incredible person our treasure had become. Eva was beautiful in the best of all ways. There was a fire in her; no, not a fire… something shimmering, like silver. Her will was strong, and her curiosity even stronger—simply insatiable. She was diligent and focused, yet open and warm-hearted. She could adapt without complaint, save for when it shod against the grain of her principles. She always kept to her principles; that was her most important principle of all.

She was everything a parent could have ever hoped for. All that I wished and prayed for her to be and become, she became.

Until that day…

We were doing final maintenance for brand-new stoneway track out in the Voccife swamps. Prani had just finished building an expansion to its wharf; they petitioned for approval to build a small stoneway from their port district out to the main line. “Seterran produce isn’t going to ship itself,” they said. They got their approval; a twennit later, Eva and I, and a whole team of civil engineers were out in the estuaries, the water thigh-high. Any part of us that wasn’t drenched by the waters got soaked by our sweat; it was one sweltering day after another, and one horrendous week. You never truly know your body until you’ve been injured in places you hadn’t thought possible.

We got stung so very many times. Looking back on it now, as a whole, we had far better luck than we probably deserved. Eva was one of the few unlucky ones. As soon as she turned feverish, I feared for the worst. I offered up my sick days and took her home.

We lived in Bristing, about a mode and quarter’s ride by the underway from Skytown. It was a little place: the upper flat of a narrow duplex, squeezed tight between a row of old townhouses on narrow street that had only just been paved. Our flat was a little crooked near the top; Eva had always said it was like a tired tike, the way it leaned against the shoulders of the stalwart townhouses right next door.

I set her up nice and comfortable in her bed; bought a little generator to set up a warming enchantment on the covers. She felt so cold, she kept on telling me; a couple hours later, she screamed and cried, convinced that someone was trying to roast her alive. And so, I would turn it down. Not too long after, she’d start trembling and shivering, her teeth chattering like knocking bones. To the touch, she felt like fire.

She would never get up from that bed. It took the doctor only a couple of hours to arrive after I’d first placed the call. Even so, it already felt like I’d been through the Abyss and back.

“Blue fever,” he said. Nothing he could do. “She’s a strong one, though… so I can’t say how long.”

In the end, it took five long days and nights, not counting the one spent on the levecar on the ride back home.

It’s not the kind of experience that can be described with any justice. Even now, it still takes me a great effort to commit the words to the pages. What terrified me above all else was a stray thought that came to me, in the middle of the night of the third day.

There was a part of me that wanted her to die. To have to watch her suffer through that nightmare of ice and fire, in agony each and every moment… it broke me. I wished she would die, only so that she would not have to suffer. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of this.

I wonder… does that make me a sinner? Or a defective parent? That’s a question whose answer I’ll probably never know.

She was so weak when the end finally came. Yet, beaten and defeated though she was, that shimmering silver sliver in her soul stayed until the very end.

I’ll never forget that moment for as long as I live.

I was in the middle of what should have been a simple matter: brewing her a cup of herbal tea. The stove, of all things, had decided to break down. I needed to re-tune the fields for its operating enchantments. I was trying to jostle the panel off the front of the thing when I heard her call me. Her voice was so soft—so quiet—barely above a whisper. But I heard it, all the same.

I came rushing in. Her covers were drenched again.

“Eva,” I said. “The sheets; the blanket. They need to be—”

“—No, Papa.” Her voice trembled; her breathing was shaky. “I want to tell you….”

I knelt down at her bedside. “What? What is it, sweetheart?”

“My secret,” she said.

I saw her try to smile. I nearly lost it then, but I had to stay strong.

“I’ve been making something.” She spoke her words slowly, struggling through them, one by one. “For a long time, now.”

“Yes?” I whispered.

She turned her head toward me. Sweat matted her hair to the nape of her neck.

“A world.”

“What?” I still didn’t understand.

“Remember that one game we used to play… when I was little?” She shuddered, squinting her eyes shut for a moment. “You… you told me that the train… that it was an enchanted land. Remember?”

How could I ever forget? It had been one of my biggest successes.

“Those little stories you made up… they were like gems, Papa. I treasured them. And—and so I,” she gasped.

“Yes?”

“I made some of my own.”

Lights went off inside my mind.

“Your notebooks! Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?”

Weakly, she nodded. “I wanted to show them to you, but, I was always worried that they weren’t good enough. That they weren’t… finished.”

“Well,” I said. I tried my best to sound brave—for her sake. “Now is as good a time as any.”

I’d placed her box of possessions on the kitchen table when I’d brought her back into the house, five days before. Not a soul had touched them since then.

As I rose up, she reached out and grabbed my arm. The palms of her hands were like wet rags: clammy, loose, and weak.

“But it’s not finished yet….”

“Never you worry about that, Eva. We can finish them, together.”

I was already in tears.

I went into the kitchen. It took me only a moment. I pulled out the smaller box inside the larger one where she kept her notebooks.

I walked back over to her room.

“Here, Eva,” I said. “I have them.” I set the box of notebooks down the on the chair by her desk.

But she didn’t say anything. I turned my head to look.

It was like a painting, done in shadows and dark tones. Beads of sweat clung to her face, and to her arms where the sleeves had been rolled up. Her skin seemed almost grey toned; near her face, tinted a pale, ashen blue. She didn’t move.

She was gone.